this political negligence suggests that obama has chosen to ignore negative budget projections, credit downgrades, falling revenues and perpetual increases in mandatory spending. instead, the president is teeing up partisan legislative battles with republicans in hopes of -- but as a measurement of the president's seriousness, his second inaugural address can only be seen as a grand failure that missed yet another historic opportunity to call americans together in the name of shared sacrifice. and richard haass, there is another opportunity, which would be the state of the union which i'm sort of banking on. >> traditionally inaugurals are the poetry, and then the state of the union becomes the prose. and the president did not prepare for educate the american people about some of the tough decisions to come, particularly on medicare and medicaid. so the real question going forward for the state of the union is whether he essentially addresses that. and whether he -- because we've still got more than, i think, more than $2 trillion in serious cuts to be made to entitlements over the nex